Facebook Inc. has purchased a blockchain startup called Chainspace in an apparent acquihire, according to reports.

Cheddar first reported the purchase of the company, formally named Daffodil Ltd., saying the deal will see four of the five researchers behind Chainspace’s academic white paper join Facebook’s blockchain group. A statement on the Chainspace website seemingly confirmed the news, saying that “we’re excited to announce that the team is moving to something new.”

In an acquihire, a company acquires another company for the talent rather than for the technology. In a roundabout way, Facebook partially denied the deal, telling Coindesk that it hadn’t acquired the startup itself or its technology but that some of its staffers had joined Facebook’s internal blockchain group. Whether Facebook paid for those staffers to join wasn’t specified, so it’s not completely clear it was an acquihire.

The price of the deal, if there was one, was not disclosed. It’s not known if Chainspace had raised any money prior to the deal, but a number of sites indicate that it was working toward an initial coin offering.

Founded in 2017 by researchers from University College London, Chainspace was working on blockchain scalability problems such as the application of sharding, a type of database partitioning, to smart contracts.

The hirings come as Facebook appears to be moving more into blockchain solutions including the development of its own cryptocurrency. In December it was reported that Facebook is designing a stablecoin, a cryptocurrency with a set value, for use with its WhatsApp messaging app.

The rumored coin would be first applied to remittance payments in India but could be utilized far wider given that WhatsApp itself is the world’s most popular messaging app. As of October, it had an estimated 1.5 billion users, 200 million more than Facebook Messenger in second place.

In various blockchain-related jobs advertised by Facebook the same month, the social networking giant hinted at broader uses again.

“We’re exploring areas of interest across all facets of blockchain technology,” the ads read. “Our ultimate goal is to help billions of people with access to things they don’t have now — that could be things like equitable financial services, new ways to save, or new ways to share information.”

Image: Chainspace